wife could get US citizenship. The Godfather’s solution was simple: Just don’t tell anyone. He’d never told his wives or ex-wives about his Agency job, and he’d never told the Agency about his wives and ex-wives. As a result he’d been able to remain overseas for many years.
A retired officer named Two Dog Dave dropped by our class periodically, always to give us the same disturbing prescription for life in a foreign country: Get two dogs. “This way,” he explained, “if a burglar tries to feed poisoned meat to your dog, one dog will eat the poison, but the other will still be ready to bark and bite.”
A visiting speaker described a recent breakdown in an overseas station. The station chief accused the deputy chief of being a wife-beater. The deputy in turn accused the chief, a woman, of sexual harassment and sexual misbehavior. The Agency charged the chief with sexual misbehavior, removed her from her position, and sent her back to HQs to an unimportant job. She sued the Agency, which settled out of court and paid her $410,000. She later became a lawyer specializing in litigation against government agencies.9
In the past, most of the Agency’s employees had been men. The case officers had all been men, and the wife’s role had been to support her husband and the family. Our instructors’ wives had never worked for the Agency. But by the early 1990s the Agency was about 40 percent female and by 2007 the gender ratio was about one to one. An increasing number of HQs employees were married to each other and were called “tandem couples.”
Jonah envied these tandem couples and called them One For the Price of Twos or OFTPOTs. He wanted to put his wife on the payroll, too, but she’d refused. Equality of men and women in the workplace became a tool used by many Agency employees to double their household income. In most American workplaces, it’s an enormous challenge for both parents to work full-time jobs while raising their children. In the government, with a relaxed eight-hour day of chatting and coffee, it’s not a problem. OFTPOTs could use “flex” time, in which one of them might work from 0700 to 1500 and the other from 0900 to 1700, so that one of them could be there to see the kids off to school and the other could be home when the kids returned. Both would have plenty of energy left over to play with the kids and help with their homework.
In theory, there were rules meant to prevent conflicts of interest—that is, rules prohibiting wives and husbands from working in the same office. But the OFTPOTs were often the same age, grade, and specialty, and given the Agency’s love of bureaucracy, it wasn’t unusual for a husband and wife to end up as two distinct layers of management within a single office.
DURING THE TRAINING COURSE, one of our children was born. Babies have a way of arriving at inconvenient hours, and this one came at about 0300. Later, at about 0800, I made a series of phone calls to family members to give them the happy news, and to my instructors to say that I wouldn’t be in that day. At noon I got a call from Harry.
“Where the hell are you?”
“My wife had a baby early this morning,” I said. “I called and left a message.”
“You get in here now,” he said. He was not impressed. “This is a demanding course and we can’t afford to be falling behind like this.”
The baby and my wife were resting and I wasn’t needed at the hospital, so I obeyed the order. Harry was waiting for me with a document.
“Sign the document,” he said.
“What’s it about?”
“By signing this document, you acknowledge your failure to report for training this morning. We’ll keep this document in your training file.”
I signed the document. Harry filed it in his briefcase, then assigned me an exercise that took a couple of hours to finish. I shrugged it off. It would have been nice to be with my family, but a couple of hours of training exercises before returning to the hospital wasn’t so terrible.
THE NEXT WEEK, Max had a car pickup meeting with a role-playing instructor. He picked up the instructor and they drove around, talking. Max noticed the instructor looked a little gray, and as the meeting wore on the instructor started to make choking, gurgling sounds. Max stopped the car and the instructor opened the door and made more gasping noises, then vomited a bit, mostly spitting and noise. The instructor said he’d been out too late the night before.
After Max’s exercise, we all met up in a local bar, and his instructor, feeling better, told stories about his past operations. The stories were windy and incoherent. I signaled the others to join me in another bar, the Vienna Inn, a place in Northern Virginia popular with Agency employees. The instructor didn’t seem to notice us slip away, one by one, until only Jonah remained, listening attentively to his stories.
At the Vienna Inn, a friend of Max’s joined our group. Max had known the man in the Agency’s paramilitary program. The man assumed Max had left the Agency and that none of us worked for it. After downing half a dozen glasses of beer, the man whispered that he had something to show me. He pulled out his wallet and showed me his CIA identification card.
“That’s who I really work for,” he said. He gave me a proud, boozy smile.
“Wow, you’re a secret agent? That’s really something.”
“You got that right.”
THE INSTRUCTORS, all of whom were retired, had had solid careers. Some of them had been high-ranking managers. Our active duty HQs managers, though, were more of a mixed bag. Some of them were officers who’d gotten in trouble overseas and, after receiving their one-way tickets home, had been assigned to managerial positions at HQs.
One morning, a chief from HQs came to speak to us—a chief whom a previous class had nicknamed “the Worst Spy in the World.”
The Worst Spy in the World had been assigned to a US ally. After meeting with an agent, he sat in his hotel room typing up the results on a computer. He heard a knock on the door of his hotel room, so he shut down his computer and got up to answer. A cleaning lady had come to deliver clean towels to the room. He took the stack of towels, thanked the cleaning lady, and went back to work.
A few minutes later there was another knock at the door. Figuring it was the cleaning lady again, he left his computer on with his notes visible on the screen, and went to answer the door. This time a squad of policemen surged in, pinned him down, took his computer and notes, and hauled him down to the police station for questioning. The country, though a US ally, was not an ally of Israel. The Worst Spy had used an Israeli-sounding alias, so the police thought he might be a Mossad spy. They spoke to him in harsh tones. After a few minutes he responded by breaking down and confessing to his CIA affiliation.
“Well, why didn’t you just say so!” the police said, relieved.
Everyone was all smiles, and the police gave him a ride to the American embassy. The embassy gave him his one-way ticket back to the US.
The Worst Spy, true to his moniker, was a whiner: “After all I’d been through, as soon as I got back to HQs, the first people who came to see me were from Accounting. They demanded that I account for the missing $100,000 in cash I’d been given for my revolving fund!” The Worst Spy’s personal finances and Agency accountings were in disarray when he returned to the US, so he picked up a paper route to help make ends meet. He arose early each morning to deliver newspapers before reporting to his job at HQs.
We later learned that the Worst Spy had first come to the attention of the police because, while riding a bus to a meeting, he’d discussed his religion with his fellow passengers. They were drug smugglers.
